Feed Your Brain With These Fascinating Facts
stuff you may not have known
Published 8 years ago in Wow
1
In 1944 a black teenager named George Stinney was accused of murdering two white girls on flimsy evidence, he was tried without legal representation with an all-white jury, and he was executed by electric chair at the age of 14. Executioners noted that he was too small for the electric chair when he died; the straps did not fit him, an electrode was too big for his leg, and the boy had to sit on a bible to fit properly in the chair.
3
Emanuel Bronner of “Dr. Bronner’s Soaps” was a German-born Jew who escaped the rise of Nazism. His last correspondence from his parents was a postcard that read “You were right. —Your loving father.” They died in the concentration camps. As the family was Jewish, he pleaded with his parents to emigrate with him for fear of the then-ascendant Nazi Party, but they refused.
5
A man was once accidentally released from prison 90 years early due to clerical error. He then started building his life by getting a job, getting married, having kids, coaching youth soccer, being active in his church. Authorities realized the mistake 6 years later and sent him back to prison. It was in 2000 that Lima-Marin and another man were convicted after robbing two Aurora video stores when Lima-Marin was 20. In one robbery, they ordered employees into a back room at gunpoint, and a worker was ordered to the floor as they demanded money from a safe. A judge sentenced Lima-Marin to serve consecutive sentences on eight convictions, for a total of 98 years. But a court clerk mistakenly wrote in his file that the sentences were to run at the same time. Corrections officials depend on that file to determine how much time an inmate should serve. As a result, he was released on parole in 2008 after serving just eight years.
6
After WW2 the Japanese Admiral who invented the idea of kamikaze pilots committed ritual suicide, seppuku, as an apology. After cutting through his abdomen he refused the customary beheading, instead slowly dying over several hours. Ōnishi committed ritual suicide (seppuku) in his quarters on 16 August 1945, following the unconditional surrender of Japan at the end of World War II. His suicide note apologized to the approximately 4,000 pilots whom he had sent to their deaths, and urged all young civilians who had survived the war to work towards rebuilding Japan and peace among nations. He also stated that he would offer his death as a penance to the kamikaze pilots and their families. Accordingly, he did not use a kaishakunin (a second who executes him by beheading), and died of self-inflicted injuries over a period of 15 hours.
8
After four years of eating Cap’n Crunch with Crunchberries, a woman sued the distributor of Cap’n Crunch because she discovered that she was eating brightly-colored cereal balls, and that “Crunchberries” aren’t a real fruit like she had thought The survival of the instant claim would require this Court to ignore all concepts of personal responsibility and common sense. The Court has no intention of allowing that to happen.
9
After stepping on her trainer’s head, Mary the Asian elephant (also known as ‘Murderous Mary”) was hanged from a crane until death. It was later discovered that she had an infected tooth, and the unqualified trainer had prodded it, which caused her to react. The details of the aftermath are confused in a maze of sensationalist newspaper stories and folklore. Most accounts indicate that she calmed down afterward and didn’t charge the onlookers, who began chanting, “Kill the elephant! Let’s kill it.” Within minutes, local blacksmith Hench Cox tried to kill Mary, firing five rounds with little effect. Meanwhile, the leaders of several nearby towns threatened not to allow the circus to visit if Mary was included. The circus owner, Charlie Sparks, reluctantly decided that the only way to quickly resolve the potentially ruinous situation was to kill the elephant in public. On the following day, a foggy and rainy September 13, 1916, Mary was transported by rail to Unicoi County, Tennessee, where a crowd of over 2,500 people (including most of the town’s children) assembled in the Clinchfield Railroad yard.
12
King Tut’s parents were probably brother and sister, and as a result he had a clubbed foot, wide hips, potbelly, female-like breasts, required a cane, and was prone to malarial infections. In 2010 researchers performing DNA analyses on the remains of King Tut and his relatives made a shocking announcement. The boy king, they believed, was the product of incest between the pharaoh Akhenaten and one of his sisters. Inbreeding was rampant among ancient Egyptian royals, who saw themselves as descendants of the gods and hoped to maintain pure bloodlines. Experts think this trend contributed to higher incidences of congenital defects—such as King Tut’s cleft palate and club foot—among rulers. Tutankhamen himself would eventually marry his father’s daughter by his chief wife—his half-sister, Ankhesenamun.
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